Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Turkeys 1: Humans 0

I believe the fact that we have turkeys has come up now and again. They're tremendous pains in the rear, in fact. As chicks, they were cute and fluffy and very noisy. Things went downhill from there. When they were first introduced to the outside world, they were too chicken (pardon the pun) to keep the chickens from eating their food. That means the Better Half had to guard them while they ate.

Once they got larger, they figured out how hold their own on the food front. They also learned how to fly over the fence into our yard and, better yet, into the neighbor's yards. They discovered that they were large enough to bully the chickens, but only as a gang. The ringleader of that got butchered a while back. One on one, the chickens can still hold their own. Anyhow, it's about time to butcher the other five turkeys. It seems unlikely they'll be getting any bigger and they don't produce eggs that we've found.

Rather than attempting to chase down the turkeys and catch them for manual slaying, the Better Half attempted to shoot one of the hens with a pellet gun this morning. Four or five pellets to the head later, there were four frightened turkeys and one dazed but otherwise unharmed turkey staggering off to join her flockmates. It would appear turkeys have thick skulls, leaving even less room for brains inside those tiny, reptilian heads.

Next up is the construction of a leg catching device to enable hoisting them by the leg from a distance. They don't generally start running until you get within a meter or so of them, so such a device should be enough to enable the catch and stab method again. Such are the joys of homesteading, even urban homesteading. Which leads me to thinking about how different the attitudes toward animals we're imparting to the Spawn are from those of our peers. But that's another post, perhaps.

Yeah, this was at the recommendation of the Better Half's best male friend, who hunts. It would appear he does not hunt turkeys with a pellet gun, however. I'd like to see footage of the iaijutsu stuff though!